Making the Compaq F500 Laptop Dual Bootable for Vista and Windows XP

After
installing Windows XP on my F500 laptop
I decided to take the next step and make the machine dual bootable.
My rationale for doing so was that, although I prefer Windows XP to Vista,
I did not want to give up easy access to
the only copy of Vista currently available to me. Also, a dual booting
machine gives me additional inherent flexibility and redundancy that a
single OS machine does not have. And since the Vista partition is seen as a
2nd disk by XP (and vice versa), little disk space is actually lost and
sharing files between both OSes becomes trivial.

After considering several options, I decided to use Vista's boot loader
as the vehicle to select which OS to use, and I also elected to install
the dual boot setup on the original hard drive which came with the machine.
Since we had
previously loaded a copy of Windows XP
onto another disk, I elected to use that load instead of installing XP
from scratch all over again. If your situation is different, you'll have
to modify these notes accordingly.
Here are the series of steps we went through to make this work:

Give Yourself an Out

Before making any changes to a disk with critical data on it, please
make a backup. We used
Norton Ghost
to backup the entire F500 hard drive (both the active and recovery
partitions) onto a separate drive before making any changes.
Whatever method you use, make sure you are comfortable with the restore
procedure before making changes to the original disk.

Making Room on the Hard Drive

Initially, we tried using
Partition Magic
to carve out some space for XP, but we discovered that our version of
Partition Magic did not seem to like the Vista partition. Perhaps we need
to buy a new version of Partition Magic, but we worked around the problem
by using Vista's own builtin tools to resize its active partition, and it
worked reasonably well. Here's the basic procedure:

Select the amount of free space you desire for the XP partition. Note
that there are some Vista system files (restore points, swap files, etc.) that
cannot be moved while Vista is runing and thus there is a limit on the amount
of space that can be
reclaimed using this method. We weren't able to free as much space as we
originally desired,
but we were able to shrink the partition to just over 1/2 its original size,
and this was satisfactory for our purpose. We then used the space we just
freed to create a second XP partition. We did this by right clicking on the
unallocated space and selecting New simple volume. Follow the
New simple volume Wizard and accept the defaults until you get to
the point where you
can insert "Volume label" and type XP there to make identification of your
XP installation drive easy. At this point you would select the "Quick Format"
to speed the process and continue with the wizard to completion of this
action, if you were loading XP from scratch. However, we used a different
approach.

Loading XP

This part was relatively painless, because the hard work of finding
and loading all the right drivers had
already been done. Before removing the
drive on which we had initially built XP, we used Norton Ghost to back up
the XP partition to another external disk. We then used Norton Ghost
to import (restore) this backed up partition to the newly created partition
on our dual-boot drive. Norton Ghost had no problem copying the backed up
XP partition to our newly created smaller XP partition.

Tweaking the Boot Loader

Next, we used EasyBCD to
configure the dual boot option in the Vista boot loader.
Run EasyBCD (requires UAP approval),
and select Add/Remove Entries -> Add an Entry -> XP. Type the drive
letter of the XP partition you just created and loaded, and name it something
to denote that it is Windows XP. Finally, click on Add Entry.

Next, copy the following three files from the top level directory on
the XP partition to the top level directory of the Vista partition
(none of these files should exist by default on Vista):
boot.ini, ntldr, and NTDETECT.COM. These are needed
by the boot loader to boot XP. Depending on
how you have Vista configured, you may have to go to Control Panel ->
Folder Options and uncheck the Hide protected operating system
files box.

After performing the above steps, upon booting the F500, you should see
a screen that allows you to select either Vista or Windows XP. I made
XP the default boot option (again, using EasyBCD). This default, as well
as the time allowed for manually choosing which OS to boot before the boot
loader arbitrarily boots the default OS, is configurable by EasyBCD.

When Vista is active, the XP partition appears as a secondary partition
to Vista, and when XP is running the Vista partition is accessible in a
similar fashion.
This permits data to be easily shared between the two OSes.

As with any free advice, we make no warranties about its correctness
or fitness of purpose for your application. We do not assume any
responsibilities for any problems that may arise from attempting to
follow these directions. We also have no idea if attempting this
procedure will void your warranty with Compaq. We have
tried to accurately represent what we did to dual boot Vista and XP on
our F500 laptop, and we can only state it works for us and we're quite
satisfied with the results. Good luck and good hacking!